One of the "revelations" of the Senate report on CIA torture has been the role played by two psychologists in devising the regimen of torture used by the Agency. [A quick but necessary digression: please note that this torture regimen has been lauded as "effective" and "life-saving" by the Obama Administration -- even after the release of the report; indeed, the Administration says that the fruits of these crimes still "inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day." Just bear that in mind as you read the reams of justified denunciations of the Bush Administration for the commission of these particular crimes by this particular agency. The Bush thugs should be excoriated -- and prosecuted -- for their crimes. But a multitude of crimes in many forms (including torture) are still being ...

A truncated version of the Senate investigation into the CIA's Terror War torture regime has finally been released. Even in its limited form, it details an operation of vile depravity, one which would plunge a civilized nation into a profound crisis of conscience and spark a deep and anguished debate on how best to transform a system of government -- and a national ethos -- that could lead to such putrid crimes. It would also occasion a wide-ranging effort to subject the originators, perpetrators and accomplices of the torture program to the full measure of legal punishment they deserve.Needless to say, nothing like that is going to happen in America. Indeed, even before the report was released, the New York Times -- the standard-bearer and shaper of "decent" liberal thought for the nat...

Eric Garner. Another unarmed black man gone down for no good goddamn reason, with not even a charge for those who caused his death. Not even a charge, not a trial, no open public examination of the facts. I’m not going to pontificate on this issue, because there are a multitude of African-American voices who can speak more directly and eloquently to this situation than yet another middle-aged white man. I’ll just point to this piece I wrote a few months ago “following the police berzerkery in Ferguson, Missouri.”The post dealt with the fact that this kind of thing has been going on for a long, long time — strange fruit bearing on a multitude of blood-soaked trees. This particular post focused on the emblematic case of George Jackson, killed in San Quentin in 1971. But it’s a piece that ...

So now there is no money left for the Syrian refugees created by the civil war fomented and fanned for years on end by Western governments. (Who, bizarrely, then prosecute any of their citizens who go off to fight in the war their governments promote as a noble and worthy cause.) For want of $64 million — the amount of money the US spends in an eyeblink on its drone campaigns and death squads, the kind of money that’s just chump change for, say, oligarchs who prowl the world destabilizing governments and monetizing misery for their own pockets — the UN says it must halt a vital support program for Syrian refugees.What is happening in Syria is sickening and surreal. Almost all of the public discourse surrounding this vast and vile slaughterhouse has been completely divorced from reality....

Andy Worthington asks a burning question: “Why is Shaker Aamer still at Gitmo?” And after detailing the case of Aamer — an innocent man sold to the American security forces by the human traffickers who partnered with the CIA in Afghanistan, a man who was cleared for release from the American concentration camp seven years ago — Worthington suggests the likely answer:

Moscow-based American writer and critic John Freedman has penned a tremendously powerful piece on his blog, Russian Culture in Landmarks. Writing a response to an article by Russian-born writer Martha Gessen in the New York Times, Freedman has encapsulated, in so many ways, the experience of those of us who, in this grim and ugly century, have "lost" both our countries -- the America that gave us birth, and the Russia which, as with Rilke, became our "spiritual homeland" -- to bizarre, brutal, murderous, belligerent, xenophobic, mean-spirited, wilfully ignorant perversions of themselves. In America, in Russia, and in so many other places around the world, what is best in human nature has indeed been “captured by aliens and stuffed into a trunk” — to borrow Freedman’s chillingly apt evoc...

Oh dear. Rand Paul, favorite candidate of those who dream of an anti-imperial coalition of hardcore libertarians and the antiwar left, has popped many a bubble this week with his proposed Senate bill to declare war on ISIS.Supporters will doubtless say that Paul (like another young politician on the make who served as a blank screen for his followers' aspirations for genuine hope and change) is merely playing "11th dimensional chess" with the move, trying to put America's war machine back on a Constitutional footing, while outflanking potential rivals for the GOP nomination who might otherwise have painted him as "soft" on killing large amounts of people with massive amounts of expensive and profitable machinery. But Paul is not simply calling the war machine's bluff. As Antiwar.com poi...

"My brother's blood is crying from the gravebut you can't hear the voiceI stand in jeopardy every hour,Wonderin' what reason you have to rejoice.Look at your feet see where they've been toLook at your hands, see what they've been into…Yonder comes sin..."– B. Dylan

Glenn Greenwald notes the blizzard of bellicose propaganda pieces pouring from the High Media lately concerning the Peace Laureate's latest flurry of drone killings. In story after story, headline after headline, we hear of "militants" slaughtered by the dead-eyed machinery that floats above the distant villages of the "recalcitrant tribes" who bedevil the Empire with their disobedience -- or, in the case of the drone campaign, which overwhelmingly kills innocent civilians, with their mere existence.Greenwald draws on a new article by Steve Coll in the New Yorker, which provides a detailed -- and damning -- look at the Progressive Way of State Terror as practiced by our noble Nobelist in the White House. Coll in turn draws on the remarkable efforts of photographer Noor Behram, who for y...